Hands-on: ‘PresenZ’ Tech Converts Cinema-quality CGI into Volumetric Video on PC VR & Quest

PresenZ is a professional-grade tool for converting cinema-quality CGI content for 6DOF viewing in VR. With the recently updated Immersix app for PC VR headsets, you can demo the tech with a fresh batch of newly released content. A streaming version made for Quest is also in development. We go to check out both versions first hand. The creators of the tech hope to give world-class CGI studios like Pixar and DreamWorks a streamlined way to make cinema-quality CGI content readily available to a VR audience.

So let’s get the easy part out of the way.

Immersix is a platform for playing back CGI content that’s been converted into volumetric video using the Presenz technology, which means it supports comfortable and immersive 6DOF viewing. The app was recently updated with new content: ‘Weightless’, a free-to-view music video with cosmic visuals; and ‘Sharkarma: Guardian of the Oceans (Part 1)’, a $4 in-app purchase that “puts you at the center of an underwater survival thriller.”

Now let’s talk about the more complicated part: what’s the tech behind this and why does it matter?

First, volumetric video (meaning any immersive video content supporting 6DOF) is inherently more comfortable and immersive than the usual stereoscopic 180 or 360 video. That’s because 180 and 360 video only responds when you rotate your head, but not when you translate your head (ie: move your head through space). On the other hand, volumetric video allows for both rotation and translation within the content, which makes it feel considerably more immersive.

Second, there’s some content that’s so visually detailed that it simply can’t be rendered in real-time, even on a high-end PC. If you think of your favorite Pixar movie, it looks so good because each frame takes ages to render. Because it’s not ‘real-time rendering’ like a videogame, it’s typically called ‘pre-rendered’. Pre-rendering gives computers time to do things like highly detailed ray-tracing, supersampling, and many render passes to enhance the look of each frame.

Presenz exists as a way to convert CGI content into a pre-rendered format which can be viewed on VR headsets while preserving the comfort and immersion of volumetric video.

I got to check out the latest iteration of the tech and was impressed to find that it indeed delivers on this promise. The volumetric content served up through Immersix really is proper 6DOF and it’s definitely more comfortable and more immersive than the same content in 180 or 360 video.

Here’s the caveat though: the content that’s currently available in Immersix is, arguably, better looking than what could be rendered in real-time on a suitably high-end PC. But it’s not obviously better. However, this is primarily a limitation of the currently available content, not the tech.

As a tech demo, Immersix is exciting, but what it really needs to shine is truly top-tier CGI content—the kind of stuff you see from major studios that release blockbuster CGI films.

I know for certain that the current quality level isn’t a limitation of the tech because I’ve seen unreleased content, converted with the Presenz tech, that truly felt like stepping into a Pixar or DreamWorks movie.

Presenz exists with the goal of becoming a streamlined pipeline for getting that kind of top-tier CGI content from major studios into VR headsets. But that content isn’t there just yet.

Going Deeper

Give your memory some serious props if Presenz sounds familiar… indeed we first wrote about the tech way back in 2016. Between then and now, it’s been a bumpy ride.

Originally owned by a company called Nozon, the Presenz tech was sold to developer and publisher Starbreeze in late 2016.

But when Starbreeze nearly went bankrupt in late 2018, Presenz was spun out as an independent entity. From there Presenz was eventually picked up by V-Nova, a company specializing in video compression.

According to Presenz creator Tristan Salomé—who is still heading the project after all these years—the partnership with V-Nova solves a crucial challenge the tech has long faced: large file sizes.

As you can imagine, cinema-quality CGI can take up a lot of space. Now add all the additional data needed to compute 6DOF views… and you can quickly end up with tens or hundreds of gigabytes for relatively short-form content.

V-Nova says that since its acquisition of Presenz the company has worked to refine the tech to make it more practical for major studios and consumers alike. As they put it, they’ve taken it from a ‘tech demo’ to a ‘real tool’.

On the studio side, V-Nova says it has built Presenz plugins for the rendering tools used by major CGI studios, like Pixar and DreamWorks, which allows a streamlined conversion of existing CGI into volumetric video. The idea is that these studios already spend lots of time and money making high quality CGI assets and content; if they had a way to easily convert that content into volumetric video, they could tap into an audience of millions of VR headsets as a new distribution platform.

On the consumer side, the improvements in compression have enabled the creation of the Immersix app which gives PC VR users a way to view Presenz content for the first time.

But even after compression and performance optimizations, Immersix still requires the power of a PC for playback.

However, V-Nova understands that accessibility is everything when it comes to video distribution. To that end, the company is also building a cloud-rendered version of the Immersix app for standalone headsets like Quest.

This cloud-rendered version is already in development and I got to see an early demo running on a Quest 3. What I saw looked and felt just like the desktop version, except it was being rendered in the cloud and beamed down to my Quest headset. This, of course, requires good bandwidth and a modern, well-optimized Wi-Fi setup. But it opens the door to millions, if not tens of millions, of potential viewers across Quest headsets.

We’ll have to wait and see if the release of Immersix for PC VR headsets (and eventually Quest headsets) creates a large enough demand for high-quality CGI content in VR. And while Presenz has been around at least 10 years at this point, the partnership with V-Nova and renewed interest in high quality spatial video (driven in a big way by Vision Pro) could be the moment the tech has been waiting for.